Dear Game Devs: Please Stop Telling Us $60 Isn't A Lot Of Money

Recently, I made the call to stop reviewing games on a regular basis for this site, for one reason: I’m getting married, and weddings are time-consuming and expensive events. I broke down the cost and found I simply couldn’t afford to buy every major game coming out every month.

So you can imagine how I felt, reading Cliffy B’s missive on Kotaku about how microtransactions and DLC are good things, and how games are cheaper than ever, so stop whining, dammit, just stop whining!

The whole thing’s here, if you want to read it, but I can essentially boil it down to this one quote:

Adjusted for inflation, your average video game is actually cheaper than it ever has been.

The basic argument is that the game industry now spends hundreds of millions instead of millions of dollars developing and marketing a game, and that being in a business is hard, so stop complaining about annoyances like microtransactions and DLC.

For some reason, game developers love doing this. Volition’s Jameson Durall wrote a similar piece last year, although focused more on used games. And to a point, it’s reasonable to have a push and pull discussion about games and their value, and for gamers to understand the economics behind the industry. If gamers are inadvertently screwing over developers, they should know.

But the blunt reality is this: Nobody cares about the value of games relative to the price of inflation. They care about it relative to how much is in their bank account. In almost any other form of entertainment, $60 is a premium price. In most cases, concert tickets are cheaper than a new video game, after fees.

Gaming is not a cheap hobby, and pretending it is insults everybody who enjoys it. A lot of gamers work pretty hard and can afford to buy, at most, one or two new games a year. There are a lot of kids saving their allowance, a lot of teenagers working crappy minimum wage jobs, and a lot of adults working day jobs they probably don’t entirely enjoy, and asking $60 out of them is a lot. For some gamers, that’s an entire day’s work, or a year of saving.

So, game developers, I’m begging you, stop writing this article. Yeah, we get that it’s not a lot of money relative to the value for you.

If developers made games with better replay value, and consumers weren’t nickel-and-dimed to death over DLC, people might be more niclined to come of $60 for a new game. As it is, I’d rather spend a few bucks on a game at the App Store and get a couple of hours of fun out of a game there.

Agreed half of the games aren’t worth that price and when you add on DLCs you are expected to buy its a little but much. As much as I want tomb raider and god of war I won’t be buying another game till injustice. Congrats on your impending nuptials must be a special lady to give up all those games.

I would like to see Cliffy B’s work to show that games cost less now then they did in the 90s due to “inflation” and not the ridiculous overheads developers and publishers are sticking on games. I wouldn’t be surprised if they start using movie math so no game is ever profitable, ya know, like how Star Wars isn’t profitable.

Actually, as far as that goes, he’s right. An NES game in 1987 ran you $40 to $50, about $80 to $100 in today’s dollars. But if you want to be an economist about it, you should compare that with the rise or decline in wages and discretionary income.

According to the Consumer Price index, $1 in 1987 bought the same amount of goods & services as $2.03 does today. In 1987 that average household income was $24,432 vs $49,103 today. The thing is, the median income numbers are increasingly skewed by this fact — currently 38% of all the wealth in the US is owned by the top 1% of earners vs. 10% owned by the top 1% in 1987. In other words, median income has risen at the same rate as inflation, only because the ultra rich have gotten a LOT richer. The average shmo has not seen a 100% rise in income from 1987.

Carl, you are confusing the word median with the word mean. The median is the middle point of all salaries, and is unaffected by the disparity between the highest and the lowest incomes. The median of the numbers 100, 5, 4, 3, and 2 is 4. This value is not skewed by the outlier.

The mean of those same 5 numbers, on the other hand, is 22.8. The mean income would be skewed by income disparity, NOT the median. If your information is true, then the fact that the median income doubled absolutely does mean that the realized income of the average American has increased by 100%.

I always love a guy who’s definitely making deep six figures a year (or possibly more) telling us not to complain about the price of games. also, as a general rule, I don’t listen to anyone who goes by the name “Cliffy B.”

Imagination is free. Books from the public library are free. Encyclopedias are free. Rocks are free. Throwing a rock through a Gamestop window is free. Stealing a game from a Gamestop is free. Successfully evading police is free.

It’s actually a pretty complex issue. I do agree with Cliffy B for the most part. Games cost a fortune to develop, and while there’s certainly exceptions, the hardcore expect better looking, faster, more detailed games. It costs a ton of money for each new iteration to be better than the last, and we shouldn’t have this expectation that games will continue to be the same price or even get cheaper through time. And yet I paid over $70 a few times for certain carts back in the SNES days.

That said, the market is COMPLETELY different than it was when the 360 and PS3 launched. Mobile games generate massive business and Steam has transformed PC distribution. Games are cheap and plentiful in those venues, and unlike mobile games from several years ago, the quality is consistently high.

$60 for a new blockbuster release is still perfectly reasonable, I think. But the divide that exists between console gaming and the rest of the gaming industry needs to change – that change coming from Microsoft, Sony and their publishers.

And they’re not even close to getting there. Microsoft is on the last day of a “massive” game sale on XBL. Most of the prices were deep discounts from their regular prices – but the many of the deals were for regular editions of the games that simply matched the prices of special/GOTY editions available from most retailers.

I don’t work in that industry – I’m just extrapolating from what I see in my work in film and TV, and I do see a lot of similar situations.

COD is a completely separate issue, though. People are willing to plunk down $60 every year, even though many seem to complain about it every time. But they still do it. Activision’s developers don’t even have to try anymore. The phrase “vote with your wallet” is bandied about in the gaming press and among gamers a lot, but that advice seems to go largely ignored. Honestly, I feel that we gamers should be pointing the finger at ourselves first. If we stopped buying games we don’t really feel are worth $60, then we’d see changes happen more quickly than are currently happening.

I used to have a great deal at my Blockbuster, where for $15/month, I could just walk in and take any game off the shelf, but then they closed, and now I have realized that games are expensive as hell. I miss that Blockbuster.

“Another factor to consider is the fact that many game development studios are in places like the San Francisco bay area, where the cost of living is extraordinarily high. (Even Seattle is pretty pricey these days.) ”
Well no shit Sherlock. It’s expensive as hell to live in Cali. If you’re that concerned about the bottom line maybe move your company somewhere else. I understand it’s probably ideal to be around other Tech-y companies like Google, Microsoft, etc but with video conferencing and the technology we have available it wouldn’t make much difference collaboration wise if you picked up shop and headed to a place like Austin, Denver, Phoenix, or somewhere in the Midwest even where you could potentially save millions in rent, cost of living, etc.

The greatest games I ever played where back when game companies were spending millions of dollars instead of hundreds of millions. I’m not saying games are worse today than they were back in the SNES/Sega days, they’re not. A lot of games are just as good if not better. But the idea that to make a great game you must spend $100 million + is silly. Not everything needs to look like The Last of Us. Some games would benefit from a reduced budget.

Exactly, key point is voice-over work. I don’t get why these companies think it’s worth paying a Hollywood actor a premium to voice a character when a good voice actor could do the same job. “Granny Rags” in Dishonored is a perfect example, Susan Sarandon brought nothing unique to the role that would justify how much she was paid.

This article seems like a severe overreaction if all you’re going to quote is that particular piece. I haven’t done the math myself but I’d believe he’s right. Adjusted for inflation games probably are the cheapest they’ve ever been. Nothing in that comment quoted above mentions that you should shut your trap and pay for it.

The rest of the comments he made in that piece were pretty on point as well, especially where he reminds everyone that the game industry is an industry and that companies exist to make money, not to entertain you. They entertain you only as much as it’s necessary to get you to pay for their products. It’s kind of like film and television in that way; they’re completely non-essential products that you don’t have a right to, you have an option to purchase them as your finances allow. If you don’t like a product being offered for sale, don’t buy it. Don’t see movies that are shit, Hollywood doesn’t owe you a good product. Don’t watch TV shows you think are hokey, mass produced shit; media companies don’t owe you good TV.

Actually, games are completely different from film and television (not that the games industry doesn’t want to desperately cling to this comparison).

First of all, most of TV and film are built on multiple revenue streams that the user doesn’t pay most of the cost for: It can be put on a cable network, so the cable provider is paying for it; it can sell ads during airtime, raising more money; it can be sold after air online for between $1.89 and $3 a pop; it can be syndicated; it can be shown on airplanes… it is very, very hard for even the crappiest Hollywood movie to not make money.

Part of the problem for developers and publishers is that they don’t have those streams of revenue, which is Cliffy B’s argument, and is valid as far as it goes. The problem is that those revenue streams are built on you buying a $60 game, and then buying a $30 DLC pass, and then continuing to buy $60 games with $30 DLC passes. And publishers and devs are trying very hard to implement price controls that shuts down the free market.

And bluntly, yes, they do exist to entertain us. That’s their job. If they don’t entertain us, why would we keep giving them $60 every year or so?

My comparison wasn’t based on product monetization strategies. It was based on the fact that they both produce completely non-essentially goods or services, so I don’t have to respond to the inaccurate statement about how easily movies apparently make money.

We’re not talking about someone setting the price too high on an HIV cure here. This is the entitled gamer mentality that makes gamers as a group impossible to please. These businesses exist first and foremost to make money. Entertainment is a product for sale and the value is relative to everyone. The only expectation you should have for being entertained by any media company is just enough entertainment that you believe it’s worth the price they’ve set for it.

Like many other commenters here, I don’t buy games when they’re first released anymore. The amount of entertainment provided isn’t worth $60 to me when I know that 60 days later it’ll cost $20 less.

People love to threaten the industry by talking about iOS games only costing $2.99 and saying they’re just as good as major console games. Yes, if you want to play bite sized games they’re going to cost less. But if they were really just as good as major console games people wouldn’t continue to complain about the price tag on an XBOX 360 game because they’d be too busy playing all those games on their smart phones. The fact is people still find those games to be worth $60 because the market has supported that price for years and years and years now.

I guess the point of my ranting is simply that it’s a very typical gamer mentality to complain that a for-profit business, which exists primarily to make money is trying to make money because the product they sell happens to be a good time for you. I’m not going to die if I don’t have an iPhone; it’s a toy. So I don’t complain when I have to pay $400 for it. There are alternatives.

Who’s destroying the free market? People can’t continue to claim the end is nigh for the gaming industry as we know it because of all these indie games, mobile games, Ouya, etc. and then claim that somehow the free market is being shut down. It’s there, the alternatives just aren’t good enough so we’ll continue to spend $60 on these games and $30 for the DLC subs until there’s really something more valuable that costs less.

I also think that WittyPhrase’s supposition that “the alternatives just aren’t good enough so we’ll continue to spend $60 on these games” has already been proved wrong in the PC market. I never pay $60 for a game on PC anymore.

In fact, I have bought exactly two $60 console games in the last 12 months, and in both cases it was so that I could play online with friends who only have consoles (CoD and Borderlands). Every other game has been either on PC or reduced in price (as opposed to used).

That’s kind of a self serving perspective. “Games aren’t worth $60 because I don’t pay $60 for them anymore.” That’s just not the right way to look at it. I don’t pay that for games anymore either, as I indicated above. But the market clearly supports that price because that continues to be the base price for new console games (generally). I would love to see some variance based on companies deciding to provide games of various sizes or scope for corresponding prices.

I’m bummed that we won’t be getting as many reviews from you Dan, but I do understand. I base my decisions on what games to get (usually on sale on Steam as I don’t mind waiting a while) on great reviews like yours. Good luck with the wedding and such.

I am not greatly informed on the industry, but I will say that a game that came out on a cartridge that I would by for NES or Sega was also much more polished. Many games that come out now seem to be in beta stage when they are released with extremely frustrating problems that aren’t fixed until 12 patches down the line. The DLC thing can be kind of annoying as well on some games. Not all, but some feel like they should have been part of the game at release.

I’m gonna call out this one only on the “cartridge games were more polished” assertion. I played a lot of cartridge games with horrendous, game-wrecking bugs, and a lot more that were simply “unfinished”- rushed out the door with missing features, things referred to in the manual which weren’t in the game, or (in one memorable case) a large dungeon that they just wouldn’t let you go in.

Maybe I remember it better than it was. I just keep thinking of all the issues I have had on recent games that seem like they should have been fixed before hand. Things that made me have to stop until they were fixed. But then, it is possible my memory is clouded by the fact that I didn’t know any better, so maybe I just dealt with it. More and more often I find my memory is incorrectly shaded by my ignorance at the time.

One of the few advantages games have today is the devs’ ability to patch/fix games after the fact. Unfortunately that door also swings the other way and it can make companies cheat and release unfinished games knowing that they’ll just fix it later. I would just say that the complexity of programming involved in games today amplifies the number and effect of those bugs.

That’s not my fucking problem, game company. You don’t get to decide what is and what isn’t expensive to me.

And stop pretending that you’re spending all this money on development. You’re not. One of you “develops” something once every five years and then everyone in the industry makes as many games as they possibly can based on that one development. You jackasses don’t even try to hide it. You use “based on the [insert popular game] engine” in your advertising.

To be fair, the engine is just one part of the game. There’s also art assets, bug checking, game design (Unreal doesn’t come packaged with all the elements, you have to make it work), and so on. Even buying libraries and engines only saves you so much time and money.

I disagree. EA, for example, isn’t spending jack shit on anything in their Sports division (unless hookers and cocaine are research). They’re going to update the rosters and charge $60 for every single one of their professional sports franchises, and those games are where they make all of their money.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 aren’t different games. Tweaks don’t cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

I’m not a computer scientist but I’d be willing to bet that there are bigger differences in the designs of the 2013 Honda Civic and the 2014 Honda Civic than there are in any perennial video game franchise.

A fair chunk of that is marketing budget, but that said, there’s more going on than you might at first think. Video games are INCREDIBLY complicated pieces of code and a lot can go wrong even with tested materials.

Is there a lot of inefficiency? I think so. Generally when a game crashes and burns it’s because something was going off the rails behind the scenes, and a lot of games I play have the smell of more ambition than money, time, or budget.

No one in the history of the world has said that their job is anything other than extremely complicated and absolutely necessary when challenged about the value of that job.

The video game industry wants u s to believe that every single game they make is a Pixar movie. That Madden 2012 and NCAA Football 2012 were each, individually, as painstakingly crafted as Toy Story 3, that none of the mocap is shared, that the code for the PS3 and XBOX 360 is wildly different.

And where the hell is all this marketing money going? Discs are cheap. Ink is cheap. Shipping is cheap. Advertising on ESPN during Sports Nation and on ScyFy at 3 in the morning is cheap Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and Target buy in ridiculous bulk, which has been contracted before the games are even begun.

Actually, I don’t know why I’m arguing with you. The last video game I bought was Knights of the Old Republic 2 for the PC. I don’t even own a PC anymore, at least one that works. The last video game system I bought was the GameCube. My wife bought a Wii, which I never liked. So they can charge whatever they want. They’re not getting any of my money, regardless.

I don’t really mind paying $60 for a “good” game at launch. That’s my decision to do so, instead of waiting for a price drop or buying it used. However, when I pay $60 and its a crap game? (Aliens: Colonial Marines) That’s on the developer. How do you justify that, CliffyB?

Definitely agree on all points. I always laugh when people with 0 financial issues want to preach to average joes on what is or isn’t affordable. Dan, you may have covered this before but you guys don’t get review copies of new games? Not sure how the industry works with regards to game reviewing.

I do occasionally get review copies, but I had a policy of paying for a game, because that way I knew what day-one issues might face people. Playing debug code is different from playing a finished product.

You think $ 60 is to much? Here in Europe, games will go for about $ 85…

Your point is completely valid. I believe the prices are going to kill the gaming industry within 5-10 years if they don’t do anything about it. I understand that beautiful games take a lot of time and money to make, but I’m

(to finish my post )… convinced sakes can increase by 30-35 percent, by cutting prices by a third. Everybody should be happy; gamers can afford the games they want, and developers get in the same amount of money, while selling more games, thus reaching a greater audience.

This is why I only ever really pick like two or three games and when I do I buy the special editions. When I bought ACIII I spent over 100$ but with that I got a statue a flag a belt buckle and a few extra maps. I bought in November and I’m still playing it. The fact is price is relative to production but price isn’t relative to my wallet and that disconnect will unfortunately grow as things get more advanced

i think the most infuriating thing about cliffy b’s article is that all january long the tvs where i work ran interviews from the VGAs and he basically said to our reporter that all he’s been doing since leaving epic was sitting around, eating funyuns and jerkin it onto his wifes face.

that last part is implied, but im not about to have a guy who can live comfortably for months on end without punching a clock tell me im not spending enough goddamn money on glowing pink heart spraypaint for my chainsaw gun.

Just because you buy something for work does not mean you can write the whole thing off, you write of a small percent. If that was the case I would own 10 building for the sake of business. Labor has increased, prime example is middle income. In order for companies to produce more of our favorite games, they must earn a profit and invest in new technology and people. On the other side, lower the price enough to $40( hopefully covers cost) and make up for loss of revenue through volume.

With each new production run, manufacturing cost of the game is decreased. Majority of cost is from labor and software costs. So can we find away to lower cost, provide a cheaper game and cover the loss my volume?

I’m sorry but what kind of jobs do people have where they can only afford games 1-2 times a year? $60 is a tad on the expensive side but it’s nothing too crazy. I buy games at the very least every 2 months and I do not make that much money. I include it in my finances like any other thing, just as an entertainment cost.

I have to agree with the whole “if you don’t like it, don’t buy it” train of thought, and along those same lines if you can’t afford it, don’t buy it. I don’t want to defend large corporations by any means, but if someone makes a game I think I’ll enjoy, I’ll buy it, and I’ll buy DLC(I will say right now the only DLC I’ve ever bought was for Skyrim and Dark Souls). I don’t think it’s wrong for them to try and make profits, but I do believe there are a lot of superflous costs involved in current games as a lot of people have already mentioned.

Even when I was working at a grocery store at 16 I was able to afford way more than 1-2 games a year, that just sounds so strange to me.

And when you working at said grocery story, did you have mortgage/rent, pay for your own food, car payments, pay for your own health care, care for children? I mean, come on man … everyone had more money to spend on crap when they were living at home and mommy and daddy paid for all of the really expensive shit.

Divide the cost of the game by the total number of hours you’ll play your new game this year.
If the game cost $60 and you play it for 10 hours (low number lets be honest), that means you’ll pay $6/hour for your game this year. 50 hours would be $1.2/hour. There aren’t many cheaper ways to entertain yourself. I hate the prices too but just sayin.

“I broke down the cost and found I simply couldn’t afford to buy every major game coming out every month.”
Sheesh, must be tough growing up. If reviewing is your job, your job should pay for the games. If it’s not you sound really self-entitled by expecting to be able to get all hot new games every month.

“concert tickets are cheaper than a new video game, after fees.”
A concert lasts what, 3 hours max ? So that’s how many dollars per hour of entertainment ? Now tell me, how many hours of playtime does the average videogame have ?

“Gaming is not a cheap hobby”.
Yes it is. Buy Battlefield 3 for $60, play it for 8 months. That’s cheap.
Get into rally-racing, or rc airplanes, or hot-air-balloon flying, see how long $60 lasts you.

“and pretending it is insults everybody who enjoys it.”

Pretending it’s not insults people like me, who work 4 years on a single game to be told by pretentious pricks that our work has little value, but oh-yeah-by-the-way-i-do-think-it-is-my-RIGHT-to-play-your-no-value-game.

“A concert lasts what, 3 hours max ? So that’s how many dollars per hour of entertainment ? Now tell me, how many hours of playtime does the average videogame have ?”

It blows my mind how many “gamers” can’t grasp this. It’s not terribly hard to measure dollars spent per hour of entertainment. Since most games now offer, minimum, 10-20 hours of entertainment, you’re spending at most $3 to $6 bucks an hour. Given that most games average 40+ hours now, you’re looking at around a dollar an hour or so.

I think for most adults playing video games, the cost isn’t really the price of the game, but the time required.

I’d love to play Ni no Kuni. But between taking care of my home, my dog, and my other hobbies, I get maybe an hour or two a week to play it. Even then, $60 for however many hours I get out of the game? That’s a bargain for me! It’s not much more than dinner and a movie, and I get way more hours of entertainment out of it.

And as far as hobbies in general go, it’s pretty damn cheap. There aren’t many hobbies that provide this many hours per dollar of return on spend.

I can’t say I’d really agree with this. On the comment that most concert tickets aren’t $60… you spend what… 4 hours at a sweet concert? I’ve spent ~ 270 hours playing skyrim. So that’s like… 22 cents per hour. Where if you go watch a movie at the theater, you’re looking at $5 per hour.
I don’t mind paying a premium for a game that has good replayability. If the single player campaign of the game is 5 hours, and the multiplayer is terrible than yeah… $60 is a lot. But otherwise… If I get over 12 hours of gameplay out of a game, I don’t mind paying for it.

“In almost any other form of entertainment, $60 is a premium price. In most cases, concert tickets are cheaper than a new video game, after fees.” This is the worst statement related to gaming that I have ever seen. A concert is 4 hours, tops. $60 seats, depending on the artist, are absolute shit seats as well. Yet, a video game purchased at $60 usually gets every single cent milked out of it by being played over and over and over. Single player and multiplayer alike. Stop asking the game industry to tell us that $60 is a good price, because it is for good games — $60 for shit games… now that’s the kicker.

Not the ones buying them? Last I checked, game developers are typically more invested in games than most average consumers. We buy more…a LOT more. We feel the sting of many $60 purchases each month. Buying a game is too tough for you? Try making them.

I’m not sure why you would compare a $60 video game, which if fun is guaranteed to be dozens of hours of quality entertainment any time you want, to a $60 concert ticket, which may last a few hours at best in the course of one night. I would argue that due to the rise of the monolithic Ticketmaster/LiveNation, concert tickets are the LEAST value-effective form of entertainment. Definitely can’t compare it to movie tickets, which are getting even more insane, or sporting events. Should have gone for Netflix, where you can watch as much as you want for a fair price. But even then, that is basically like the Indie games of the movie world, mostly budget productions you find mildly interesting at best.

Wow this article shows your ignorance of economics. Just go read a lot of the top comments on in this reddit post and they explain how you are wrong in several different ways. I CBA to type it all out.

My problem with this article is that even if you don’t include the chance of price due to inflation, there were still games during the cartridge era that was more than $60. So for us that did pay those prices back when $60 was a lot of fucking money, we say stop your bitching.

Well said. I hate when people who makes 6-7 figure salaries talk like they know what it’s like to be forced to live on a budget. They wonder why people pirate their games, but don’t even realize that there are other devs who manage to keep their customers loyal and happy. In my opinion these companies are pushing their players to see how far they will go. It’s getting to the point where people *will* stop buying their games because they won’t be able to afford them.

If you want to pay less then $60 for a game, then wait. Wait for three or four months after it comes out. Then pay $30. Because that’s how every single one of these things work now.

I haven’t payed full price for a game since I don’t know when, but I own plenty of AAA titles that opened at $60. I just didn’t play them right away.

This same logic is used in the rest of the entertainment industry: Want to see a move the night it comes out? You’re paying the theater ~12 just for the ticket, and you’re also handling the lines. Wait for a year and it’s included with a streaming service you already pay for or a channel you already get with your TV.

Same logic applies to music. New releases are ~$30, wait for 3 months and they’re ~$15 or on Pandora.

The only reason the video game community gets any semblance of a pass is because they’re more vocal and active in the ‘community’ aspect of it than any other mainstream form of entertainment could possibly hope to be. Gamers are brats (not all of us, but let’s face it: The majority). They complained HARD ENOUGH TO CHANGE THE END OF A GAME AFTER THE FACT. That shit doesn’t happen outside of George Lucas films (same crowd, oddly enough).

Pay the $60, and the end result is that the developers get to charge their $60 and people *who are willing to pay that price* will get to play it sooner than others who won’t settle for paying less than $30. The devs get some financial boost to pay for the marketing and after the commercials and the ads are run out, the game costs half as much to download.

The fact that Dan is complaining is silly: He’s not a professional of any sorts in the game community. Here, this opinion counts as if it’s coming from any other gamer, and as a writer he’s just pandering to self entitled brats who are going to come here and complain that they can’t save $60 to buy a new game. His article starts with a ‘woe is me, I’m getting married and cant afford games’ story as if his career depends on it. It doesn’t. He’s a hobbyist bitching about prices.

You SHOULD care about the relative value, if you wish to continue buying and playing high quality games with modern production values, which people clearly do. You simply cannot ask people to make games for you at a loss and expect it to continue, it will not continue. Either have cheaper games or pay what it costs to have expensive games, it isn’t complex. Saying ‘I only care about ME’ doesn’t actually achieve a damned thing.